Urania

by Camille Flammarion

"If these forms were not so graceful, they would have seemed frightful to you; the organisms in each world are most appropriate to its conditions of existence. I acknowledge, on my part, that to the inhabitants of Mars the Apollo Belvedere and the Venus de Médicis are actual monstrosities, on account of their animal heaviness.

"Everything with us is exquisitely light, although our planet is much smaller than yours; yet the beings are larger than here, because the weight is less, and beings can grow taller without being impeded by their weight or imperilling their stability.

"They are larger and lighter, because the constructive materials of that planet are of very little density. What would have happened on the Earth if the weight had not been so great, has happened there. The winged species would have ruled over the world, instead of dwindling away in impossibility of development. On Mars, organic development is effected in the series of winged species. Martial humanity is indeed a race of sextupedal origin; but it is actually bipedal, bimanous, and what might be called bialic, since these beings have two wings.

"Their manner of life is totally different from terrestrial life, in the first place because they live in the air and on aerial plants as much as they do on the surface of the ground; and further, because they do not eat, the atmosphere being nutritive. Passions are not the same there. Murder is unknown. Humanity, being without material needs, has never lived there, even in the primitive ages, in the barbarity of rapine and war. The ideas and feelings of the inhabitants of Mars are of an entirely intellectual nature.

"Nevertheless, in dwelling on this planet, analogies at least, if not resemblances, are to be found. Thus, there is a succession of night and day there as on the Earth, which does not differ essentially from what you have, the duration of night and day being 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds. As there are 668 of these days in a Martial year, we have more time than you for our work, our investigations, and our enjoyments. Our seasons, too, are almost twice as long as yours, but they have the same intensity. The climates are not very different; a country in Mars, on the shores of the equatorial sea, differs less from the climate of France than Lapland differs from Nubia.

"An inhabitant of the Earth would not feel so very foreign. The greatest difference between the two worlds certainly consists in the great superiority of their humanity over yours.

"This superiority is principally due to the great progress realized by astronomical science and to the universal propagation among the inhabitants of that planet of that science, without which one has but false ideas of life, of creation, and of destiny. We are very much favored, as much by the acuteness of our senses as by the purity of our skies. There is much less water on Mars than on the Earth, and fewer clouds. The sky there is almost always fair, especially in the temperate zone."

"But still you often have inundations."

"Yes; and quite recently your telescopes have noticed one along the shores of a sea to which your colleagues have given a name which will always be dear to me, even when far from the Earth. The greater part of our shores are beaches, level plains. We have few mountains, and our seas are not deep. The inhabitants make use of these overflows for irrigating great stretches of country. They have straightened and enlarged the watercourses and made them like canals, and have constructed a network of immense canals all over the continents. The continents themselves are not bristling all over with Alpine or Himalayan upheavals like those of the terrestrial globe, but are immense plains, crossed in all directions by canals, which connect all the seas with one another, and by streams made to resemble canals. Formerly there was as much water on Mars, in proportion to the size of the planet, as on the Earth; gradually, from age to age, a part of the rain-water sank into the depths of the soil and did not return to the surface. It combined itself chemically with the rocks, and was withdrawn from atmospheric circulation. Then, too, from age to age, rains, snows, and winds, winter frosts and summer droughts, have disintegrated the mountains, and the watercourses, bringing fragments to the sea-basins, have gradually raised their beds. We have no more large oceans or deep seas,—nothing but inland waters; many straits, gulfs, and seas analogous to the Channel, the Red Sea, the Adriatic, the Baltic, and the Caspian; pleasant shores, quiet harbors, large lakes and streams, aerial rather than aquatic fleets, an almost always clear sky, especially in the morning. There are no mornings on Earth so luminous as ours.